Two Important Philosophical Questions and Christian Theology
The first question is What do you mean by that? The second one is How do you know? Now let's apply this to the statement: Jesus died for our sins. What sense can we make of it? How can anyone know it's true?
31 comments:
That's an easy one to answer: just go out there, and die for someone, and you'll find out the meaning. (Other questions?)
AT John W. Loftus
"He died for our sins".
what we mean by this is that we are all terrible sinners unworthy to be on this earth eating ice cream and driving shiney cars and god knew it eons ago, so he had his son killed to pay our debt; although our debt still isn't paid unless we bow down and worship and admit we are and always have been a nasty group of individuals starting with the first one of us, who laid the debt of eating forbidden fruit on our heads.
"How do you know?"
the same way we know that Ezekiel spoke to monsters with 4 faces, multiple arms and wings, and feet like calves feet. the same way we know that once, the world was covered with over six miles of water caused by a rain storm. the same way we know that sampson was so strong he knocked down a temple. the same way we know that jonas was eaten by a giant fish and survived. the same way we know that in the future(revelations) a dragon will be forced out of space down to earth and persecute a woman:
because it says so in an ancient magic book with unknown authors called the bible.
The myth that we are wretched, fallen, despicable beastly creatures must be perpetuated at all costs. How else could their purported God sell a solution to the problem of our fallen sinful nature if we aren't fallen sinful creatures.
All evidence to the contrary, we must continue to believe that we are wretched and vile. Any evidence of our progress, of our enlightment, or our increasing morality must be attributed to God through false attribution. Any evidence of human error, however, must be attributed directly to our sinful nature. Hence, God creates a problem and then creates a solution.
Just like he did when he hardened Pharoah's heart so that he could glorify himself by striking down the firstborn, God creates a problem by creating horrible despicable humans so he can glorify himself by saving them by killing his son.
Why exactly is it that God seems to solve all of the World's problems by killing?
As for the how do we know? It was written down. In a bunch of stories. It must be true. Which is why I also believe in Achilles' invincibility, Osiris' resurrection, Graendal, etc.
I could teach the happy baby-born-among-the-animals christmas story to little kids, but when the esater story asked me to teach precious 3 year olds that they were flawed, damaged, imperfect, bad enough that someone had to suffer and die to pay for their badness, that is when I had to part with the curriculum and never sign up to teach that stuff again.
God Matt!
Get it right bro! Jonah wasn't eaten by a fish! He was eaten by a whale... Whales aren't fish!
;-)
at les
see? perfect example of my despicable imperfection. i sinned by not knowing the difference between a fish and a whale. guess its off to burn in hell for me, unless god will show his love and compassion for me by killing another one of his offspring to resave me.
@ Matt
You see how far you have fallen? How wretched is the condition of man? You misunderestimated the difference between a Fish and a Whale. For shame.
@ Goprarie
It is so disempowering and pernicious. And they teach it at such a young age... It's stifling. I was terrified that I was going to Hell when I was five or six. No child should be taught that rubbish.
I dont think anyone can make any sense out of "Jesus died for our sins" unless they hold to some form of substitutionary atonement. He died because of our sins, in our place, as our substitue. The suffering was so severe because He was carrying the sins of the whole world (past, present, and future)
The wrath of God was carried out when He permitted evil men to have their way with Christ, for morally sufficient reasons,- to save sinners.
Cole,
Do you REALLY think that the creator of the ENTIRE cosmos would NEED to kill his son to assuage his own contempt for humanity's inadequacies?
Come on man! Wake up will you? It just doesn't make any sense whatsoever! Geesh!
Les,
I don't think God killed His Son to assauge His own contempt. Satan and evil humans murdered the Son of God. What Satan meant for evil God meant for good. He allowed it to happen to save sinners.
@ Cole
And why bother to create such contemptible inadequate beings in the first place?
Religious understanding just doesn’t work for me because it begins from a foundation that takes the very thing that makes us beautiful and special, our curiosity, our innate desire to know and understand and uses it to denigrate and debase us. Our ‘Original Sin’ is our greatest asset and you just don’t seem to understand how horrific that inversion is.
Jeffrey,
The way I see it is God's ultimate goal in creating is to display His glory for the joy of all people.
How does God take our curiosity and use it to denigrate and debase us. I'm not sure I understand what you are saying here.
God does humble us. If that's what you are referring to.
@ Cole,
That is not at all what I am referring to. Humanity's original sin according to your book was our desire for knowledge, for our desire to understand. Humankind's inherent desire to understand, to know, is our single greatest strength, our most beautiful attribute.
The Bible takes the most amazing thing about humanity and perverts it, debases it, uses it to create this myth of humanity as a fallen, debased, despicable creature that requires external redemption. God creates us with an inherent longing for knowledge and understanding and then damns our ENTIRE species because ONE human had the temerity to act on what God instilled within him? That is deranged.
And the Bible's hatred of curiosity and understanding and knowledge is hardly limited to the story of Original Sin. The anti-intellectualism in the Bible is staggering - I would do some 'Quote Mining' but am sure that would be viewed as taking it out of context.
Cole,
You can't be a complete idiot... We're all idiots to an extent, but seriously...
Quit playing semantics with me and lets talk about the nitty gritty for a second.
No matter how much spin you put on it, the reality is that god fundamentally killed his own son through the hands of man, so that he could THEN AND ONLY THEN say, "OK, open the pearly gates!"...
WHY, is the question, is all that even necessary?
Please... PLEASE don't give me a standard Christian response... Think for yourself man! Good god! Wake up from your slumber my friend.
You're delusional, because anyone who USED to be in your religion (I was a believer for 40 of my 42 years), and anyone else NOT in your religion clearly SEES the inadequacies of the story as a basis for living one's life...
Sure, they PREACH some good things, but then again they preach some pretty bad things as well.
Wake up bro... ;-(
Jeffery,
The Bible does teach us that we are all sinners and that nobody is perfect. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and so do we. It also teaches that we are fearfully and wonderfully made by God (in His image). Man is a paradox.
God isn't against knowledge and understanding but He wants us to direct those desires to what is most deeply satisfying - Himself. He is the way the truth and the life.
John Piper has just written a book on the mind and what the scriptures teach about it. His point is that God doesn't want us to be anti-intellectual. It's called "Think" if you are interested.
BTW I don't agree with everything Piper has written or believes.
At cole: you said "Satan and evil humans murdered the Son of God", so i have to ask: doesn't christianity say that it was prophecized that this would happen? and if so, if this was preordained by god, then how can you say that this was an act of satan and evil men? wouldn't it be true that satan and these men were acting as gods agents to fulfill what you all call prophesy? shouldn't satan and these men who (supposedly) crucified jesus be revered as agents of the lord and glorified as heros to the cause? i guess satan isn;t such a bad guy after all.
more confusion from the book of happy daddy and the funtime gang i guess.
What do you mean by that?
Seems to me like the God of the Christian bible likes to sacrifice children for all sorts of reasons. This time he sacrificed his own, apparently to atone for the sins of every human born on earth before Jesus and since. A somewhat illogical act, since God apparently also has it in his power to forgive everyone's sins anyway (without human sacrifice).
How do you know?
Well the Christians will all point to the obviously historically factual (well bits of it, other bits are just allegory) reports of the various gospels (well, those that do mention the crucifixion) which were written (and re-written) hundreds of years after the alleged event.
Matt,
I don't think that just because God knew this would happen that that means He fatalistialy determined it or caused it. God permitted it. What Satan meant for evil God meant for good.Satan and evil men were responsible for their evil deeds and God held them accountable.
Cole,
Do you REALLY think that the creator of the ENTIRE cosmos would NEED to kill his son to assuage his own contempt for humanity's inadequacies?
This was aimed at cole, but I wanted to highlight the short sightedness of this common notion. Why should the creator of the cosmos care about little ole us. Let us grant for a moment that we are the only life in the universe. If so, then we truely are the center of the cosmos in terms of importance. Nothing in our immeadiate experience is greater than conscious intentional communal persons. Nothing matters more than the entities who see the universe and see value in it. There would be no value, no worth, no importance without the subjective experiencers who know value. (now if we aren't actually alone, it isn't that important since the purpose of this illustration is to highlight the profoundly amazing creatures that we are of great worth).
So why would a triune creator send part of itself through creaturely suffering and death? Because he is that invested in us. To think this as incredible is to assume a dignum deo, a boring theology about the way God ought to be.
(and not to skirt the other question, how do we know this? to make a really long story short, it's because it fits everything else that we believers know.)
at cole. well if god didn't cause it to happen, then wouldn't it be true that he didn't know if it would happen or not and therefore there was no prophesy as claimed? and, if what christianity says is true, then didn't this need to happen? and if it needed to happen, and god let it happen because it was his will and neccessary in his eyes, weren't satan and the evil men acting on his will and doing a good work for god? a god sanctioned(allowed) and therefore god loving act? you cant have it both ways. either it was a good god inspired act neccessary for the good of mankind and these men had no choice in their actions, or it was an evil act god had no previous knowlege would happen when he supposedly put his son on earth.
Matt,
God can know something is going to happen but not be the cause of it.
The way I see it is that there are at least two aspects to God's will. The first one is where He works all things together for good for those that love Him. This is God's hidden will. I don't know God's hidden will until it comes to pass or until He reveals it to me. This aspect of God's will is God's business alone. He alone is infinite in wisdom and knowledge and He knows what is best in each circumstance. Let me be clear again that I don't believe God is the author or cause of evil but that He permits evil (for morally sufficient reasons). What Satan means for evil God means for good. I just trust God and because He is in control I have hope that He will turn it arround for good.
The second aspect of God's will is His revealed will. This is the will I try to follow. It is this:
Love God above all else and love my neighbor and my enemies as myself. This is what Jesus gave us the example to do and it's also what He taught us to do. He obviously had a Higher Power that He trusted and relied upon. He was the example of a holy and humble servant.
@ goprairie:
"but when the esater story asked me to teach precious 3 year olds that they were flawed, damaged, imperfect, bad enough that someone had to suffer and die to pay for their badness, that is when I had to part with the curriculum and never sign up to teach that stuff again."
Why didn't you stick with the
eggs and bunnies, then?
Classic brainwashing techniques: Break down the mark's ego, then tell the mark they can only be loved by the same person/church/cult that broke down their ego because they're so unworthy.
Christianity piles it on with Christ's "sacrifice." Our sins are so ginormous that they're too big for us to pay for ourselves, so a supreme being does it for us. Then we have to be grateful, because even though our sins have been forgiven, we still suck.
Cole said,
" I don't know God's hidden will until it comes to pass or until He reveals it to me."
God's not talking to you. That's a condition called "schizophrenia".
@ Rob R
Your hopeless anthropocentrism is showing. You presume that we are the center of the Universe and the most important aspect of the Universe merely because we think we are pretty nifty. You further presume that the being that is Sovereign over all of that is interested in us for some reason. This is the most presumptuous, arrogant, narcissistic conceit imaginable. God did not create the Universe for us. Presuming that the Universe DID represent an act of intentional authorship, there are innumerable reasons why such a being would have done so. Perhaps the author of the Big Bang required Dark Energy for some unfathomable extra-universal purpose. Perhaps he craves Dark Matter. Perhaps supermassive black holes are like deity strength Jawbreakers. There are INNUMERABLE reasons why an entity capable of creating the Big Bang would have done so and NO reason at all to think that it has anything to do with US.
Even more insulting, you ascribe these incredibly human centric emotions to a being that is fundamentally NOT human, all in an attempt to somehow make US important.
We are NOTHING in a cosmic sense. Our entire ecosystem, our entire planet and every human alive could be wiped out in the blink of an eye by any number of cosmic phenomena. While it would be tragic FOR US, the Universe would not care. The sun would continue fusing hydrogen into helium, the galaxy would continue spinning and every other celestial orb would continue its endless dance just as it did before.
Indeed, it is worth noting that this has happened at least FIVE times already. God certainly did nothing to prevent the cretaceous-tertiary, triassic-jurassic, permian-triassic, Denovian or ordovican-silurian extinctions. Should we be presented with an asteroid or a gamma ray burst or a supernova or a black hole, we will fare no better and all of the proud and certain religious mutterings of our ancient ancestors and their modern apologists will be for naught.
Our alleged importance is purely a figment of our massive egos.
Rather than debasing your God by attempting to shrink him down to our level and rendering him as some kind of interplanetary Santa, celebrate our glorious insignificance. Afterall, meaning is derived from within based on the bonds we have with one another - no invisible space men required. We are enough.
What are you espousing John? How can you know anything following your guideline?
All science is not empirically verifiable, but yet many of you take certain elements as fact. Second the principles of parsimony cannot be empirically verified either, yet we "know" they exist.
So if we cannot "know" Jesus or what he has done, I propose that none of us can "know" anything.
@Les wrote:
"No matter how much spin you put on it, the reality is that god fundamentally killed his own son through the hands of man, so that he could THEN AND ONLY THEN say, "OK, open the pearly gates!"..."
WHY, is the question, is all that even necessary?
Please... PLEASE don't give me a standard Christian response..."
Hi, Les. I don't know what the "standard Christian response" would be, but here's my two cents (since I don't think your question was answered).
Your comment was accurate enough, but it did not happen that way so that "he could THEN AND ONLY THEN say, "OK, open the pearly gates!", if by that you meant access to heaven would be attained.
In the statement: "The just shall live by faith", just about anyone who lived before Jesus, who had such faith, had access to heaven. Abel, Enoch, Noah, the list goes on, just to name a few. THAT faith is explained by Jesus (faith in God apart from works).
Why was all that necessary? Because no man could be found to be righteous or innocent enough to be a sacrifice for the sins of all.
If you are questioning the "why that way" and not another, there's no answer I can provide. Why God does things the way He does is beyond me. Is it really that important an issue? Is there a way He could have done it differently that you could find acceptable?
Sorry for the late response, Lyka, but your answer didn't help in the slightest.
D[ying] for someone," as you put it, isn't the same thing at all as John's topic, which was "dying for our sins." I can certainly die for someone, but I can't die for someone's sins, at least not how Jesus did it in terms of what it meant and its implications.
Harvey said "..all science is not empirically verifiable".
And how much of the gospels are empirically verifiable, Harvey?
Spend much time investigating that virgin birth, do you?
"Jesus died for our sins. What do you mean by that?"
Jesus gave His life for us to demonstrate God's Self-Sacrificing Love and humility. Jesus was not born in the highest castle with all of the most powerful kings of the earth worshipping. Instead He was born in a cave probably and placed in a donkey's manger where there was no room in the Inn.
God was making a statement about what really determines eternal position. It's not kingdoms made from man's temporary greed or lavish wealth. It's faithfulness and trust to the logical Creator.
Jesus served all of us who love Him and will someday willingly worship Him for all of eternity.
Jesus "took on" or "took upon Himself" the sins of the whole world and was separated from God the Father during this time of incredible contrast/suffering for Him. We have a worship song in Christianity that says these words "and I'll never know how much it cost - to see my sin upon that cross." This is because Jesus died of a broken heart when He took on the sins of the world. His heart burst, the scripture says. There is no way for us to know how going from eternal fellowship with God the Father..to the extreme of taking on the sins of the world... would have been so unbearable and of dramatic change in experience.
Others like Cole and Lvka have explained the atonement aspect of this.
The next question is "why" does God need Jesus to suffer and die in order to forgive our sins? and (2)how is this a payment/atonement for anything?
Jesus died for our sins. How can anyone know it's true?
I could talk about accumulative case argument here...and make the progression from evidence to agnostic theism to infinite Creator to orthodox monotheism to Judaism, Islam, or to Christ...but it is already in the human nature to argue against it (that is just one of many ironies).
I could point to worship music...and how only one belief structure has music which praises the Infinite Creator with joy/peace/love, etc... but you will claim it is experiential..no matter how much worship music is demonstrated to you.
I could point to a more accurate and correct presentation of Pascal's wager and discuss the risks of truth but you will probably argue that love must be sincere and not just out of fear...or possibility of horrible unfathomable punishment (justice with the eternal nature of sin).
Or you will argue that God's omniscience will disqualify your sincerity of belief... and either way you are doomed (until you learn the freedom of salvation, btw).
I could point to soteriological differences in Christianity from all other belief structures...or the practice of prayer and the types of prayer and you might possibly accuse me of a novelty fallacy or special pleading, etc.
The bottom line is you know it is true in your heart because God's Spirit bears witness with your spirit.
This is why it is so important to pray to the Infinite Creator FOR faith. (and you don't have to assume God to pray to Him...you can SINCERELY acknowledge possibility).
This is also why it is important to know how agnostic theism is a *conclusion* NOT an assumption.
Knowing Jesus died on the Cross for your sins IS, however, the point at which "faith" (belief) or trusting in God...is lined up with God's Omniscience about Jesus dying on the Cross for your sins.
This is when "faith/belief" is in effect - actual knowledge.
Question everything.
For me personally, I already knew it was true...but God proved it to me in a way that I can not deny the reality of Christ's moral perfection and Perfect Atonement.
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